iTunes- Weekend assignment

Being a college student in the digital age, online music, illegal downloads, Youtube, music sharing websites and more have consumed our brains with new music, artists, and the latest chart topper at all hours of the day. We listen to music constantly; studying, on the walk to class, getting ready to go out, any college student’s basic daily activities. Apple revolutionized our online music capabilities when iTunes came out in 2001.  Although music was originally available for downloading online in 1993, the demand for digital audio skyrocketed with the launch of iTunes. Being able to download music onto a portable audio player, rather than carrying around Hitclips- a portable player of 30-second clips of top songs- or the infamous Walkman for the latest CD, was the new sensation.

The first article I stumbled upon was written just after the original launch in January 2001; it describes iTunes as a way of transforming music from CD's into mp3 files on your computers hard drive, nothing about mp3 players or transferring the music from your computer and accessing it elsewhere. At its forefront, iTunes wasn't a major player in the music industry, but after the release of the iPod, the capabilities of iTunes continued to grow. An article simply titled "iTunes 1.1" written in June 2001 claimed iTunes as polished and easy to use, not to mention free, but was missing some of the trivial aspects that pricey music downloading applications had already possessed. It let anyone make his or her own playlists from already owned CD’s.

The iTunes Music Store, an online digital media store provided by Apple that came with iTunes, wasn’t opened until 2003, when iTunes made its greatest impact. As the Wall Street Journal called it, “The Birth of (legal) Napster”. An article in the New York Times called it the “first real success story in the long effort to sell music over the Internet”, also recalling Apple as “the new MTV”. However, it mentioned many issues and debates that iTunes could have with the music business and the fact that it only contained songs from major labels. This relationship between Apple and major record labels was kept at peace with copy protection, so the digital music, once bought, could not be traded freely on the Internet. As more people bought music off iTunes, it only continued to expand to what it is today. As of 2012, iTunes possessed a 64 percent share of the market for online music. April of this year, the current CEO stated that iTunes had 800 million user accounts.  Although it’s a seemingly old idea, many competitors have recently arisen in the online music sales department.  In the early articles on iTunes, it mentioned it simply as a way to download music and make playlists, which can be burned onto new CD’s. In recent articles, iTunes is boasted as the top player in the online music industry, used by close to 50% of teens worldwide, whether they have Apple computers or not, iTunes has become a sensation, that doesn’t seam like its going to be beat out by a competitor any time soon.

Nicole Hulick